I hate it here. I love it here.
Neurotransmitters, twitter, and coming to terms with this – right here, right now – being the life we have to live.
I’m on three anti-depressants now.
One of them, Zoloft, I’ve been on for years. Ever since I couldn’t stop having intrusive thoughts about having a heart attack while my toddler was in the bath, causing her to drown.
I first heard this song on Song Exploder this past May and it quickly became one the songs I would sing at the top of my lungs in the car when I would escape from my children and my personal pandemic hellscape for a few minutes in the car.
Zoloft gives your brain more serotonin. Which is what I thought was kinda the only game in town, neurotransmitter-wise. I have been aware of others - dopamine for pleasure, oxytocin for love, etc - but when it comes to the daily battle my brain tries to wage against me, I thought that SSRIs were the weapon of choice.
And then… [gestures around]
Anyway, long story short, I’m on three drugs now to help whip me into neurological shape. One of the new ones, Wellbutrin, is a Dopamine Re-uptake Inhibitor. Which is a thing I did not know existed! It turns out my brain really, really needed dopamine. I’ve been extremely depressed, and my prescriber thinks I might have ADHD? Anyway, I am not too caught up in labels, I just know that I feel a lot different now.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2008. So not the first to the party, but early enough. Twitter has always been the place where I’ve been most my unfiltered self. It was the place I would turn to when I couldn’t sleep at night, to scream into the void and get little hearts and likes and notifications that would help light up my cute little deficient dopamine receptors.
In the last 5 years or so, Twitter has served as more than just a place of distraction for me; it started to be a refuge where I felt like people really *got* me. Like, sometimes more than the people in my real life. I was extremely depressed and felt like every day the world was on fire, and here was this place where we had a shared language and a shared sense of doom.
And there has been a LOT of doom. Like a lot.
The pandemic has, by and large, felt like one big, long held breath. A clenched muscle. Waiting for doom, waiting for school to start again, waiting for a vaccine, waiting for someone to come save us, waiting for us to save ourselves. It reminds me of one of my favorite Jenny Holzer truisms:
THERE'S NO REASON TO SLEEP CURLED UP AND BENT. IT'S NOT COMFORTABLE, IT'S NOT GOOD FOR YOU, AND IT DOESN'T PROTECT YOU FROM DANGER. IF YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT AN ATTACK YOU SHOULD STAY AWAKE OR SLEEP LIGHTLY WITH LIMBS UNFURLED FOR ACTION. - Jenny Holzer, from The Living Series
Sleep lightly, with limbs unfurled for action — ready for the next attack. And then open Twitter, where you’ll find your fellow people that are also staying awake, worrying, you’ll shout into the void
Hi! Is anyone else feeling completely insane? Am I the only one?
and people will like it, and you’ll know you’re not alone.
But here’s the thing that Wellbutrin (and Zoloft, and Remeron…) is teaching me. For one thing, I’m on Twitter a lot less.
For another, that increased dopamine that is swimming around my brain is helping me to make peace with the fact that life, my life, isn’t about reaching out and finding validation and connection amidst the doomscrollers. Or, let’s be honest, it is partly about that. But it’s not only about that. There is other life out here to be lived.
It terrifies me to think about covid being an endemic way of life. But it can’t be the only thing I think about anymore. The waiting can’t be the main organizing principle of my world — the sense that I won’t be happy until ______.
There are a lot of things about my life that make me unhappy; that exacerbate my depression and anxiety and make me feel stuck. Covid, climate collapse, capitalism are some of those things and there’s nothing I can do about them. But some of the other things — those I can change. And with the help of some lovely drugs, a fuckton of therapy, and amazing IRL friends (some of whom I met and became close to on Twitter!) are helping me get there.
Here are some more songs that I rage-sang in the car this past year:
hold yourself. by Tune-Yards
Modern Girl by Sleater-Kinney
good 4 u by Olivia Rodrigo
Wellbutrin changed my life. So glad you’re feeling better.